Current major projects
Mapping Parents Educational Values (2022-2027, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark)
The purpose of the VALUES project is to map parents’ educational values and test the predictive power of these values on the educational choices of their offspring. Parents’ attitude toward education influence children’s pathways, but the composition of these attitudes is poorly understood. We ask (1) how can parents’ educational values be classified, and how do they vary between and within social classes, and (2) how do differences in educational values map onto the general parent population and how do they predict adolescents’ educational choices. We conduct interviews with 200 parents to identify their educational values and we field a survey to 9000 parents linked to admin data on children’s educational trajectories. The VALUES project advances our understanding of how advantage and disadvantage is transmitted from parents to children, as differences in educational values will constitute an important mechanism by which parents influence their children’s educational pathways.
Family Learning Environments (2017-2024, funded by the A.P. Moller Foundation)
This mixed methods project examines home learning environments in Danish families. The project establishes a typology of different learning environments and uses panel data to examine to which degree different types of home learning environments supports children’s development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. In the project, we thus ask the following research questions: 1. What are the different types of home learning environments in Danish families? 2. What is the relationship between home learning environments and children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills?
Young people’s educational expectations. A qualitative longitudinal study of 100 young people from they are 15 to 26 years of age (2017-2026, funded by The Lauritzen Foundation)
The project, running from 2017 to 2026, consists of four waves of interviews with 100 young people as they move into adulthood. Interviewing the young people at age 15, 18, 21 and 26, we examine how they shape their educational expectations and how they transition through the education system. With a particular focus on social class, we investigate how young people’s expectations link to their class origin, and what characterizes those young people that exhibit a class-traveling behavior.